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Unilever's Seeley becomes integrated marketing chair

June 29 2012: Geoff Seeley, Unilever, has been announced as the new chairman of the WFA's Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) Forum, a peer-to-peer group of senior marketers from the WFA membership, which represents multi-national companies and national advertiser associations.

The IMC Forum was launched in February 2009 and has since helped improve members' effectiveness in relation to IMC through best practice exchange and benchmarking. He replaces Michael Dick from The Coca-Cola Company.

Geoff Seeley is Global Communications Planning Director at Unilever – the world's second-largest advertiser - with key responsibility for driving the company's digital change agenda, comprising the re-engineering of communications planning and content development strategy, across 6,000 marketers, 400 brands and 190 markets. He joined Unilever in 2011 and also has 17 years' experience in media, communications planning and digital agencies.

Integrated marketing consistently ranks as one of the highest priority areas for WFA members. Many multinational marketers struggle to deliver consistently integrated communications given the bewildering increase in potential communications platforms and the corresponding rise in complexity of their agency rosters.

The group's agenda, written by its members, includes topics such as; creating simple IMC frameworks, breaking down silos, internal and external role-sorts, generating big ideas that scale and measuring the effectiveness of IMC.

The IMC Forum is next due to meet in London on September 27th. Active members include: Anheuser-Busch InBev, Beiersdorf, The Coca-Cola Company, IKEA, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft Foods, L'Oréal, Mars, McDonald's, Nokia, Orange FTG, ReckittBenckiser, Shell, Unilever as well as UDA (France) and ISBA (UK).

Said Stephan Loerke, WFA Managing Director; “Integrating marketing activity across a range of channels and platforms is one of the key challenges that marketers face today. We are delighted that Geoff Seeley will continue to lead our peer to peer efforts in this area, helping ensure WFA members are best prepared to deliver on IMC challenges for their brands.”

Note for editors:WFA is the only global organization representing the common interests of marketers. It brings together the biggest markets and marketers worldwide, representing roughly 90% of global marketing communications spend, almost US$ 700 billion annually. WFA champions responsible and effective marketing communications.